Monday, December 17, 2012

Aspirational Gun Use

And now it has happened again, bang, like clockwork, one might say: Twenty dead children—babies, really—in a kindergarten in a prosperous town in Connecticut. And a mother screaming. And twenty families told that their grade-schooler had died. After the Aurora killings, I did a few debates with advocates for the child-killing lobby—sorry, the gun lobby—and, without exception and with a mad vehemence, they told the same old lies: it doesn’t happen here more often than elsewhere (yes, it does); more people are protected by guns than killed by them (no, they aren’t—that’s a flat-out fabrication); guns don’t kill people, people do; and all the other perverted lies that people who can only be called knowing accessories to murder continue to repeat, people who are in their own way every bit as twisted and crazy as the killers whom they defend. (That they are often the same people who pretend outrage at the loss of a single embryo only makes the craziness still crazier.)

While there is much to be said about this string of slanders, let’s be crystal clear about one thing. Every law-abiding gun-owner I’ve ever met in my entire life is not only utterly opposed to the taking of innocent life, they aspire to defend innocent life at the risk of their own (of course, no one knows how they’ll respond to a crisis until the crisis actually comes).

Thank you for the crystal clarity regarding the gun-owners you know, the law-abiding ones that is, who you can't vouch for in a crisis, said crisis possibly having some bearing on their gun use.

Put together the two halves of Franch's post, and he seems to be warning that every gun owner he has ever met is aspiring to defend innocent embryos and fetuses, and hopes to die in a crossfire outside an abortion clinic surrounded by the bodies of doctors and nurses.Nice of him to warn us.

I think I am very much out of step with most of my liberal comrades on the matter of gun control [1]. However, I do want to offer Rich Abdill's fine argument about the ludicrousness of the viewpoint that Good People With Guns Will Stop Bad People.

Although I'm not sure Smut Clyde's first comment didn't pretty much nail it all in about 3% of the space.

__________[1] Fwiw: I myself do not own a gun. Never have, and likely never will, absent a sudden need to provide my own meat.

I would like to live in a society where guns are rare. My second choice would be to live in a society where guns are regulated to about the same extent that motor vehicles are.

That said, I have been persuaded -- reluctantly? resignedly? something along those lines -- by (a) the arguments put forth by the vast majority of people who like guns and never do anything bad with them [2] and (b) the political realities of the situation.

[2] For the sake of clarification, I do not consider the entity pictured here as representative of this group.